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To me the essence of a "real world" bard was that they were historians who kept oral histories. One of the Norse who memorized the Eddas or a Jewish rabbi who could recite the Talmud could both be bards. Depending on the tales, exceptional individuals of both those traditions could do magic...

That's only applies in some situations, which makes it campaign dependent. Do you search for traps in a city? In the main halls of a castle? A battlefield? The deck of a ship? Plus it induces its own gaming behavior. "Jeff, we can't rest, we've only made it in like a quarter mile and its...

One addendum to observed player behavior: The "5 Minute Adventuring day" existed in all editions, however in 1e it was generally not done past 7th-ish level. There was a window where you could recover all your spells, or at least all your good spells, in one night plus a morning of prep. At...

3e definitely made a weakness a weakness. Except for the way DR was given out like candy. And then you get the "weapons caddy" to hand out monster-specific gear. Mechanics drive player behavior. In 1e spells started out weak then got much more powerful at increasing levels. I.e. a MU-5...

Anybody else have the feel the creature tokens are from another Hasbro game like maybe backgammon? The plastic is a higher quality material with better manufacturing than I have come to expect.

FYI, if you get one of each, you can rearrange the Creature Case to hold the creature disks, the 22x25 mat plus about half the map tiles. You lose the space to store the clings but I see no reason not to simply put them on the creature disks in advance and I set up the tiles as default rooms...

Anybody have any recommendations for a fixative for the creature clings? I'm planning to permanently mount them on both sides to have a decent array of options in a dense package (e.g. 80 creatures on 40 disks) I will say the cases are a pain to open the first time. The fold-over wasn't...

You are aware that Penny Arcade has collaborated with WotC, right? You heard of Acquisition Incorporated? It's in print and D&D Beyond? It's a product of Tycho & Gabe of Penny Arcade (plus a bunch of other people like Chris Perkins of WotC which is actually my point). Plus Gabe has done art...

FYI, this could be a perfectly good single day. I.e. the giant is the BBEG. They stationed one or two spotters down in the jungle with a magic doodad of lion summoning, hired/recruited the Chimera as the guard for the mountain trail, has the soldiers as servants and the gorgon as an...

Think like the monster. What is its goal and how should it achieve it? Is it hungry? If the humanoids have mounts, torch one (and the upwind trees), adding the claw attacks to be sure its dead. Stay low and use the trees and smoke for concealment/cover. If they don't abandon the mount fast...

OK, let me show you what different combos can result in thematically similar but mechanically different characters. Parenthesis indicate subclasses. This could be a Fighter(Eldritch Knight), a Bard (Valor), Bard(Sword), a Wizard(Bladesinger) or maybe a Warlock(Hexblade). All would get some...

Want a caster with unlimited magic? That's all the full casters as they all have a handful of cantrips that can be illusions, low power, dancing lights, minor skill boosts, make holy water, etc. Use them at will and ad noseum. Also, casters can have semi-unlimited magic in the form of...

Options: God-seed: someone found a way to imprint themselves on the essential energy of a plane to become a god. It takes a century or two for them to "incubate" but when they wake they reshape the plane into their personal realm and primary avatar. Which means the disaster already happened...

I have run one "cosmic threat" campaign 30 years back. (Oddly it was very similar to the snarl in OotS) Unlike OotS where it was "impending and immediate doom", the PCs were brought in with a couple centuries before catastrophe, but with the the hanging threat of "solve this in your lifetime or...

Why does the" quest giver" dictate the overall interaction? Won't most of "the quest" be outside their presence? The high priest of Tyr may only be in the first and last scenes of a story. The rest may be spent talking to the underpaid watch, buying them drinks and food so they tell the PCs...

I have started using Obsidian for my game notes. The game I play in (but don't run) I have 26 pages of notes with 8,000 words. The game I haven't run yet is 465 pages and 140,000 words.

All true and actually making my point (which was triggered essentially by "5e should use 1e spell interruption") 23 hp is 2/3rd of a 1e troll (33hp). To get 2/3rd of a 5e troll (84hp) needs 56hp. A 13th level 5e Mage has....~56hp. And yeah, no scaling cantrips. A d4 ranged attack does 7% of...

Yes, I was refuting a point you made. Yeah, no, that's not this thread. This is the conversation about how upcasting was automatic in 1e, which you attempted to counter by pointing out differences in spell power levels. I further refuted that you couldn't look at the spell damage alone...

You know....I am starting to think all those OSR players need to quit playing overpowered characters and come play a gritty 5e game where killing a troll takes half again more fireballs, magic missile really isn't much more than a nuisance past 5th level, spells don't autoscale, there are few...

Except 5e creatures have so many more hit points. So. Many. More. The "bounding box" philosophy means AC is constrained more, so HP is generally cranked up. And if HP goes up, the effectiveness of fireball goes down. Let's take a common fireball target example: troll. A 1e & 2e troll was...